Bitcoin Core changes security rules as AI makes finding code bugs dangerously easy
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
Developers merged a policy change that ends the months-long embargo for flaws a chatbot could rediscover, after a summer in which AI found hundreds of bitcoin bugs before the humans did. Bitcoin Core, the software most of the bitcoin network runs on, will stop sitting on bug fixes for months when the bug is one an AI could find again, after its maintainers merged a change to the project’s security policy on Thursday. Core previously graded every reported vulnerability by severity and timed disclosure accordingly. Low-severity flaws were revealed two weeks after the next major version shipped. Medium and high ones stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected version reached end of life. The logic was that shipping a fix quietly and explaining it much later kept attackers from learning about a hole before the people running nodes, the computers that check and relay every bitcoin transaction, had upgraded. But the old rule was built for a world where finding a bug took…